‘As long as he was chasing, he still groomed himself,’ said Amy. ‘But all that time, he was planning to make trouble for me.’

‘So that he shouldn’t be forgotten. You were going to live on, and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t arrange a little trouble for you.’

‘You’re smiling about it.’

‘Who can say what curious things people are thinking when they consider what death will be like? I mean, how their death will affect the living. “What will the world be without me?”’

‘A childish idea.’

‘He didn’t like being alone. When we were kids, he used to force me to go into the toilet with him. You weren’t going to get rid of him so easily.’

‘So now we’re spending an afternoon in the cemetery with him,’ said Amy.

‘This is a better place than most for assessments, if you’re going to assess.’

Amy had thrown back her coat at the shoulders; it was warm inside the great black limo – the engine was idling. So that when she shrugged, the soft breasts in her sweater added weight to her shrug. ‘What’s to assess? Why would you want to pick on yourself, even here? You have obscure ways and habits, Harry. Years ago, when I had to think seriously about you, I took your quirks into consideration. Given the kinks of your high-level mental life, there was not a chance that you could ever think well of me. And I did give you serious thought. I was in love with you. But nobody else’s views were ever good enough for you. You’d put them down. And I thought: Maybe he loves me, but I’ll never know what he’s thinking. In his mind, he puts me down too … Your classification for me was “a petty-bourgeois broad.”’

‘You never told me that before,’ I said, and then I didn’t know how to continue. We had gotten along for decades without each other. Separate arrangements were made. All the while, I had concluded that I was too odd for her. Or that for various other reasons she assumed I could never be domesticated. So my emotions went into storage, more or less permanently. But by and by I began to see what sort of hold she had on me. Other women were apparitions. She, and only she, was no apparition.

‘Yes, but I had more feeling for you than you realize. What I felt was very simple. You gave me relief from double-entry mental bookkeeping,’ I said. ‘I used to think if there was a bare room in your house, without anything in it, not even a carpet, it would do me good to go in and lie face down on the wooden floor …’

The gravediggers, whom we saw from time to time by bending double, glancing through the open bar of light, seemed to be taking their time. Such work I was no longer fit for. Digging kept them fit. No Nordic Track necessary. This digging was labor of the ancient sort, when prisoners worked the treadmill and slaves went to the fields with picks and spades.